It would be me — the one person in the world who both knew what would kill his wife and would burn his entire scheme to the ground to save her.

He had trusted our friendship to blind me.

He did not understand that the same forty years that were supposed to make me his ally were precisely what made me her defender.

He had counted our friendship as his cover.

It turned out to be the thing that destroyed him.

There is a justice in that so precise that I have turned it over many times, because it contains, I think, the whole moral shape of what happened.

Luca had spent forty years building our friendship, and had come, somewhere in his calculating mind, to regard it as an asset — a thing he owned, a resource he could deploy, insurance against exactly this moment.